Early baseball in Massachusetts/Predecessor Game 34
From SABR Encyclopedia
Spread of baseball: Home -> Massachusetts -> Early baseball in Massachusetts/Predecessor Game 34 |
Location | Massachusetts |
---|---|
Year | 1830 |
City | Cambridge |
State | MA |
Country | US |
Name of game | Play ball, baseball (retro) |
You may think of Thomas Wentworth Higginson [b. 1823] as a noted abolitionist, or as the mentor of Emily Dickenson, but he was also a ballplayer and sporting advocate [see also #1858.17]. Higginson’s autobiography includes several glimpses of MA ballplaying:
-- at ten he knew many Harvard students – “their nicknames, their games, their individual haunts, -- we watched them at football and cricket [page 40]”
-- at his Cambridge school “there was perpetual playing of ball and fascinating running games [page 20]”.
-- he and his friends “played baseball and football, and a modified cricket, and on Saturdays made our way to the tenpin alleys [page 36]”.
--once enrolled at Harvard College [Class of 1841] himself, he used “the heavy three-cornered bats and large balls of the game we called cricket [page 60].” Note: sounds a bit like wicket?
-- in his early thirties he was president of a cricket club [and a skating club and a gymnastics club] in Worcester MA. [Pages 194-195
Source: Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 1898). Per Thomas L. Altherr, “Chucking the Old Apple: Recent Discoveries of Pre-1840 North American Ball Games,” Base Ball, Volume 2, number 1 (Spring 2008), pages 33-34. Accessed 11/16/2008 via Google Books search for “’cheerful yesterdays.’”